This biography of the Ninth Panchen Lama, the second highest spiritual authority in Tibetan Buddhism, offers new insights into the tumultuous history of the relations between China and Tibet at the start of the twentieth century. It demonstrates how the Panchen Lama's flight from his monastery on the night of December 22, 1923, remains an essential characterizing event of Tibet's modern history. His flight from his country set the stage for Chinese Republican, and later Communist, control over the selection of his successors, with repercussions even today for Sino-Tibetan relations.

This is the first publication in an innovative new series of research work on Asia, a collaboration between the Ecole Fran?aise d'Extr?me-Orient (EFEO) and Silkworm Books to translate French publications for an English-language readership.

Fabienne Jagou is a member of the Ecole Fran?aise d'Extr?me-Orient. She teaches Sino-Tibetan history at the University of Savoie, Chambery, France, and is author of numerous articles on modern Tibet. She received the Taiwanese-French Foundation's Education and Culture Award for this research.

Frontier Tibet: Patterns of Change in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands addresses a historical sequence that sealed the future of the Sino-Tibetan borderlands. It considers how starting in the late nineteenth century imperial formations and emerging nation-states developed competing schemes of integration and debated about where the border between China and Tibet should be. It also ponders the ways in which this border is internalised today, creating within the People's Republic of China a space that retains some characteristics of a historical frontier. The region of eastern Tibet called Kham, the focus of this volume, is a productive lens through which processes of place-making and frontier dynamics can be analysed. Using historical records and ethnography, the authors challenge purely externalist approaches to convey a sense of Kham's own centrality and the agency of the actors involved. They contribute to a history from below that is relevant to the history of China and Tibet, and of comparative value for borderland studies.